Long Lankin

by Lindsey Barraclough

  “Do you want me to show you how to ride?” cried Roger as they walked the bikes back up to the top.

  “I’d love it!”

  The flattest bit of the road, without too many potholes, was at the bottom of the hill. To begin with, Roger held the saddle while I tried to pedal. My legs were still aching and bruised, and after a few tumbles, I had scraped both knees and one elbow as well, but in the end, I was able to get along on my own. Mimi pulled up clumps of grass and threw them at the wheels as I went wobbling by.

  “See if you can do the hill,” Roger said. At first I squeezed the brakes almost all the way down, but after a couple of attempts, I managed to reach the bottom without them. I took my feet off the pedals and stuck my legs out as I flew, just like Colin Mole, who delivered for the butcher back home. Colin showed off on his bicycle all the time, going round in a circle in the middle of the street and lifting the front wheel in the air when there were girls around to watch him. The bike had a huge wicker basket over the front wheel to carry the meat in, and sometimes Colin didn’t get the balance right when he was trying his fancy tricks. Once he went right over and dropped some liver in a pile of dog’s business in the gutter. We were in fits, laughing at him.

  After an especially good run down, I turned the bike round, all ready to walk it back up again, when I saw someone standing on the brow of the hill, dark against the bright blue sky. There was no mistaking who he was. Mimi had already spotted him.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” she yelled, and started running up the road. I threw the bike down and charged after her. Dad had come to take us home!

  When we had almost reached him, he smiled that big crinkly grin of his, put down his old kit bag, took the cigarette out of his mouth, and chucked it in the grass. Then he held both arms out wide, and we jumped into them, Mimi giggling like a mad thing. I could smell the lovely familiar smell of his suit. He tickled us, and we wriggled about, laughing. I picked up his kit bag and swung it over my shoulder. Dad lifted Mimi up, and we marched happily down the hill to Auntie Ida’s.

  I knew it had to be their dad straight away. He was much younger and a heck of a lot better looking than our dad. He had a big scar down his cheek, so he looked like some sort of handsome pirate.

  Cora had dropped my bike, and the front wheel was still spinning round. I picked it up and checked the handlebars were straight. Pete was looking over at me, and I jerked my head up the hill and we started to push the bikes back up to the top, but I didn’t really feel like going down again. The sky had clouded over a bit, so it was best to go home.

  Cora, Mimi, and their dad were laughing their heads off when we passed them. Pete said he’d found a penny in his pocket, so we thought we’d call in at Mrs. Wickerby’s on the way back and get a couple of gobstoppers.

  As we tramped down the Chase, Dad asked us what it was like at Auntie Ida’s, and what on earth had I done to myself to get a black eye and so many bumps. I mumbled something about playing with the boys in the woods and flashed a look at Mimi not to say anything, but she was up on Dad’s shoulders trying to twist his hair into two horns and didn’t seem to be listening. I told him about Finn and the chickens, and he told us a joke about a three-legged pig.

  Dad’s hair was usually slicked back off his forehead like James Stewart’s, but today his thick fringe flopped around almost into his eyes. He probably couldn’t find his Brylcreem. Mum and Dad looked like a pair of film stars. Mum’s hair was lovely and soft and wavy, and she never ever had to put curlers in like the other ladies in our street, who wore them all the time under their scarves and only took them out for Christmas and funerals.

  “Is she back? Mum?” I whispered excitedly in his ear.

  I could see from the way he turned his eyes away that she wasn’t.

  I heard them coming long before I saw them. I got his short scrappy letter, but I didn’t say anything to the girls because Harry was never reliable and I didn’t want them to be disappointed if he didn’t turn up. I’ve lived in this wild place all my life and can predict the direction of the wind more easily than which way Harry is going to blow.

  I watch as they come tramping up the Chase, laughing, Mimi up on his shoulders, clapping her hands. He’s like Saint George to those two, just like he was for Susan.

  Mind you, he’s turned up, I’ll give him that. Some dodgy deal must have fallen through for him to make his way here in the middle of the week like this.

  I stand on the bridge and wave. Finn shoots off towards them, barking as usual, but even the dog is bowled over by him. Finn gives him no trouble at all.

  Harry grins and gives me a quick peck on the cheek. “Ooh, I could murder a cup of char, Ida. Nice and strong, two sugars. Ruddy long walk from the station. Don’t the ruddy buses run out here?”

  “Oh, come on, Harry, it’s only a few miles.”

  I lay in bed, excited, catching the smell of Dad’s cigarette from downstairs, a warm, safe smell. Every Sunday morning, I’d go down to Mrs. Prewitt’s and get ten Player’s Navy Cut for Dad, five Weights for Mum, and a packet of Spangles for Mimi and me, but the last week at home before we came out here, I just went for the Player’s.

  I was hoping that when Mum did come home again, she wouldn’t have got any thinner. She’d changed a lot since their wedding photo was taken. They’d married just after the war. Mum was only eighteen, and Dad wore his demob suit, the blue with red pinstripes that’s still hanging in the cupboard. Dad was so young he wasn’t long in the war before he was out of it again. Sometimes, when they thought Mimi and I were fast asleep, I could hear Mum and Dad shouting downstairs. Once I heard her yelling that the most Dad had seen of any action was behind the huts at Catterick Camp.

  Maybe one day they’d go back to those dances at the British Legion and she would fit into the lovely black dress with the pink roses and ballerinas all over the wide skirt with its layers of white netting underneath. Perhaps this time it wouldn’t show up the long bones just below her neck. Sometimes I’d go and look at the dress where it was hanging on the back of their bedroom door and run my fingers over the roses and ballerinas. It made everything else in the room look worn out and grubby. Mum called it her Golden Slippers dress. Dad had won a lot of money on a horse called Golden Slippers, and Mr. Bates had come round and yelled at Dad in the kitchen, and we had cream cakes twice in the same week.

  When Mum was in one of her funny moods and went to their bedroom and lay there with the curtains shut for hours and hours, I’d sometimes take Mimi next door to Auntie Ivy’s — that’s Mrs. Bedelius next door to us on the other side to the Woolletts — for our tea. Auntie Ivy had six children in a house the same as ours, and once, when they were little, they all had to go to the hospital at the same time because they got a disease with sleeping in the same bed, three up one end and three down the bottom, and one of them died and never came home, and that’s why there’s only five now, though they’re nearly all grown up.

  Auntie Ivy’s oldest girl, Cissie, was my best friend, even though she was much older than me. She was really funny and made me laugh a lot. Once she told me that the scruffy old geezer at the end of the street called Mr. Pickles had said that if she gave him a penny, he’d show her something worth looking at. Then Cissie laughed and laughed and said that she told Mr. Pickles if he gave her ten bob, she’d go and get her brother Mike, and he could show Mr. Pickles something that was in a jolly sight better condition than anything Mr. Pickles had on offer.

  I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about, but I laughed anyway because you couldn’t help laughing when Cissie did.

  There were always young hopefuls knocking on the door for Cissie, but in the end, she fell for a chap from over Hoxton way called Roy Poupart. He was no great looker, but he laughed almost as much as she did. Dad said they were like a pair of hyenas. You could hear them through the wall.

  Roy and his mates played in a band called Mervyn and the Wildfires, and when he and Cissie got married, they set it all up in our street. They pu
t the wires for the guitars and the microphones through Auntie Ivy’s window and plugged them into the light fittings. The bloke who was playing bass, Larry, had to stand right next to the wall for the whole afternoon; otherwise his wire wouldn’t reach. Every now and then he’d call for me to get him a sausage roll and a bottle of Watneys.

  After Roy and Cissie got back from the church, people came from all over the place to join in the dancing and have a drink and a piece of cake, but Mrs. Peake at number 6 told Auntie Ivy that the whole street was going to blow up with all the extra electrics — that’s if the noise didn’t shred her nerves first. Then Mrs. Woollett came out and said that her mother — that’s Mrs. Bracegirdle — was dying, so if they was going to play loud music, it’d better be hymns; then Auntie Ivy said shut up, your bloody mother’s been dying for the last three years, and I’m blowed if we’re going to have “Abide with Me” all bloody afternoon just on the off chance. Then Mrs. Woollett shouted at Auntie Ivy that she could blimmin’ well say what she liked about her mother, but she still had all her own teeth, which was more than Auntie Ivy’d got.

  After that Roy got the band to play “Great Balls of Fire,” and you could hear Mrs. Bracegirdle shrieking her head off from her bed in the Woolletts’ front room, but they just turned up the loudspeakers.

  Cissie spent her whole wedding day in fits of laughter, even when Roy spilled his beer down the nice white dress that her dad hadn’t finished paying for on the “never never.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Lan, who ran a Chinese restaurant called the Jade Dragon on the Commercial Road, came with their two little boys, Number One Son and Number Two Son, and a huge bowl of rice mixed up with fried egg, and even a box of chopsticks for us to eat it with, but I couldn’t work them out so I had to go indoors for a spoon. Mimi was all by herself in the house, napping in her cot, even with all the noise outside. I shouted for Mum but couldn’t find her anywhere.

  Dad and Uncle Dick Bedelius got drunk and sang some rude army songs, and Auntie Ivy swore at Uncle Dick in front of all the neighbours, but he couldn’t have cared less. Then I think she must have had a bit too much of the Babycham herself because she started another slanging match with Mrs. Peake, saying she was quick to have a go about the music but didn’t mind stuffing her gob with the food.

  I could hear people singing and laughing and shouting and fighting all night long, and in the morning, the street was a dreadful mess. For ages afterwards, people would talk about what a lovely day it was when Cissie Bedelius got married. It was the best day of my life, or it would have been if it hadn’t meant Cissie wasn’t going to be there anymore.

  After the wedding, Cissie and Roy went to live with his mum and dad in Hoxton. They were going to have the spare bedroom because, luckily for Cissie and Roy, his mum’s Hungarian lodger had died.

  A few months later, Mum was upstairs in the bedroom asleep and Dad was out. The pans were still dirty in the sink, and I couldn’t find anything in the cupboard for Mimi’s dinner. There wasn’t even a shilling in the blue jug to go and buy some bread, so I popped with Mimi to Auntie Ivy’s for something to eat. She squashed us round the table with her family and cooked us all egg and chips. Just as we were finishing, a dreadful wailing noise came through the wall from our house next door. It sounded like “It’s all my fault, it’s all my fault,” over and over again. The Bedeliuses went quiet and looked at each other, then at Mimi and me.

  Auntie Ivy shot up, went out the back way, then returned five minutes later and said the old pushchair was in their yard for Uncle Dick to sort out for Cissie now she was expecting, and would I like to take Mimi for a walk in it. I said it would be lovely, so she got a cushion and put it on the seat because some of the stuffing was sticking out.

  The pushchair made such a racket, you could hear us coming a mile away. We squeaked over the Commercial Road and I took Mimi to see the big boats and barges coming into the docks from all over everywhere in the world. There was a huge ship unloading bananas. I hadn’t had a banana for ages.

  One of the dockers winked at me and pinched two off a bunch and gave them to us. They were green and rock hard. I knew the docker’s name was Albert because his mate saw him talking to me and said, “Is that your best girl, Albert?”

  Albert said if we hung around, we might see a taranchelar, which was a big hairy spider that they sometimes found hiding in the banana bunches, and that a mate of his called Old Jacko got bitten by one on his nose and he’d died of the poison. Albert said spider poison was a special sort called vemon, but I didn’t know if it was a joke or not, so we left just in case one jumped out and stuck its teeth in us.

  Just as we turned into our street, one of the wheels dropped off the pushchair, so we were really lucky to have got down the docks and back again. By that time, Dad was at Auntie Ivy’s, but he looked tired and wouldn’t tell me a joke when I asked. He took us round to some friends of his, Auntie Kath and Uncle Norman.

  Auntie Kath was pretty and plump, and on hot days wore a blue sunsuit with white polka dots that showed quite a lot of her bosoms. We stayed with them for a few weeks, but I didn’t like it. Auntie Kath smacked us sometimes. It wasn’t like staying at Nan’s, but Nan had gone back to Scotland and couldn’t mind us anymore. Auntie Kath had made Mimi eat dumplings, and she was sick all over her plate. I thought that was why they didn’t want to have us again and we had to come all the way out here to Auntie Ida’s.

  I couldn’t sleep, so I threw back the covers and put my feet down on the cool floorboards. Then I opened the door and went out on the landing. The soft light from the lamp in the hall below, and the comforting blue cigarette smoke drew me to the top of the stairs.

  I could just hear Dad and Auntie Ida talking quietly in the sitting room. The door was half-open, but their voices were so low there seemed to be something deliberately hushed in the way they were speaking. When I had left the bedroom, I had half thought that I would just go down and see Dad, but now I was curious to hear what he and Auntie Ida were discussing so secretly together.

  I already knew every creak on that vast staircase and crept downstairs, avoiding them all. Then I moved as noiselessly as a shadow and settled down on the little old milking stool that stood on its three short legs in the hall beside the sitting-room door. I breathed light shallow breaths so that Dad and Auntie Ida wouldn’t hear me.

  “Kath and Norman weren’t too keen after last time… .” Dad was saying.

  When Mum came home that time, she couldn’t remember some things. She forgot it was Mimi’s birthday.

  “I’m pretty sure I know why you couldn’t ask Kath and Norman, Harry,” said Auntie Ida. “Susan used to write to me now and then, you know. She’s no fool. She knew what was going on with Kath.”

  “It was all in Sue’s imagination,” said Dad quickly. “It must be all part of this — this condition.”

  “Come off it, Harry. I’m not as ignorant as you think,” snapped Auntie Ida. “I’ve always known what you’re like. It’s got nothing to do with how Susan is. Anyway, doesn’t it occur to you that it’s much more likely to be a result of — because of — you know — with Anne?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. She doesn’t talk about it, Ida. Ever.”

  “Maybe that’s the problem.”

  They went quiet for a while. I heard liquid being poured into a glass, then Dad striking a match and the smell of a fresh cigarette.

  “What if she’s kept in for weeks?” he said at last. “Or … what if she never gets better?”

  Auntie Ida spoke again. “I don’t want them here, Harry.”

  “There was nowhere else, Ida — you know that,” said Dad. “I don’t know how long Susan’s going to be in this time. It’s worse than it’s ever been before. I don’t know if it’s because Mimi is that age, and of course Cora is the older sister like she was —”

  “All the more reason they shouldn’t be here, Harry. I’ve no idea how safe it is. I’m tired of listening and watching. I don’t know wh
ether it’s all in the past now, or whether there’s still something … I don’t know… .”

  “I didn’t know there was anything wrong with Susan,” said Dad. “All the blokes were after her — she was such a corker. We had a real lark at the beginning. You know what it was like just after the war — bloody miserable, freezing bloody weather, nothing to eat, country in flamin’ ruins — but we was all right, Sue and me. It was only when she started spinning this daft yarn about Annie, and really believed it, Ida, that I thought, Uh-oh, what’s going on here, then? I told her to shut up about it — it was just a load of old rubbish and she was to stop going on. I’d had it up to here, Ida. It was enough to try the patience of a bloody saint, I’m telling you.”

  “No wonder she doesn’t talk about it.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Auntie Ida sighed deeply.

  “I can’t watch them twenty-four hours a day, Harry. It’s beyond me. Thank God Cora’s happy to cart Mimi around with her — I’ll give her that much at least: she’s very patient with her. They’ve made friends with some local boys. It’s fine when they play up in the village — I can almost relax when I know that’s where they are — but children can’t resist that church. I’ve tried to stop them going there, but I think they’ve seen something. I’m not sure. You know what children are like.” She paused. “We’ve come to blows, Harry. I’ve had to teach Cora a lesson.”

  “I noticed the bruises,” said Dad uncomfortably, shifting in his chair. “I hope you haven’t been too hard on her, Ida — what with Susan and everything, she must be feeling bad at the moment. Anyway, for Pete’s sake, it’s just an old superstition — ruddy crazy, if you ask me.”

  “I’m not asking you!” Auntie cried. “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, so don’t pretend you do! It’s dangerous, and that’s the end of it! You can’t lock them up all day, can you? You can’t expect them to stay in the house all the time, and when the weather’s hot —”